We Are Not in Pakistan (29 page)

“Got any pictures? Of Ma and you, I mean.”

He nods, having anticipated this one. “A few.”

“Videos?”

“Only a couple of Betas.”

“What's Beta?”

“A video format — it's not around any more.” He brings a shoebox of photos, places it before him on the coffee table and sits down. He rifles through them and hands her one.

“Rita and I. At school.”

She sinks to the floor beside the table, legs folded beneath her, and supports her head on her hand as she looks at it closely.

Without the photographs, he might persuade himself that Rita never existed as his wife, that she was just a one-time helpful friend with whom he'd lost touch.

Uma looks up, holds his gaze.

“How much did you pay her?”

He can all but taste the anger in her words. Silence is his best defence.

“I heard twenty-five hundred.”

He nods. Decides repentance would be dishonest. “You'd pay a personal matchmaker about the same.”

“Yeah, but this was
citizenship.”

“A resident alien card,” he corrects her. “After two years, if you can prove you're still married. And the
possibility
of citizenship, if you apply, after another five. In fact, I've only recently applied. And I'm sure Rita had her reasons.” Feelings are layered, inaccessible. He wants to be precise, bring them into words for her. “We
were friends. At least, at the beginning … I thought of it like an arranged marriage.”

A hooting laugh. “Bet you Ma didn't.” She takes a cigarette from her pocket and lights up.

“Nor did her mother,” says Karan. “She didn't want us to stay married after the two years unless I cut my hair and no longer tied a turban.”

“Makes sense. Grandma's practical.”

“No, it doesn't make sense. No one should ask that.”

Uma taps her cigarette on the edge of the table; ash falls on tile. “Yeah, I guess. I don't know her very well — she got remarried and moved to Chicago after Grandpa died. Ma said Grandma had to be someone's wife or she didn't believe she was alive. She'd call Grandma every Sunday morning and hand me the phone, and Grandma would tell me how I should try giving Ma cod liver oil pills or green tea. But she never showed up to see us for more than a day.”

She blows a smoke ring. “What about your ma? How did she take it?”

“Not well. Only son marrying a gora woman — I mean someone non-Indian. It was uncommon in the early eighties. But she put a good face on it, sent jewellery for the wedding.”

“Wow. So who got the jewellery, you or Ma?”

“Rita.”

“Hmmm. She must have sold it when we were having budget troubles.” Uma leans forward. “So you both stuck it out two years. Was it worth it, you think?”

Karan strokes his moustache. The answer Uma expects plays through his mind like the drone of a repetitive raag. He should be so grateful to live in the land of the free and the home of the brave. But there were bad times, better times, okay times, good times. Any immigrant would say that.

Some very bad times after 9/11.

”Dr Singh, tell us: why did you travel to Pakistan in 1997?”

“A bus service had opened up between India and Pakistan. My mother was dying and I knew she wanted a picture of the house in Multan where she was born.”

“You want us to believe you went to Pakistan to take a photo? Which other cities did you visit? Who did you meet? Were you ever in Afghanistan?”

His alien registration card said he was a permanent resident on Day One. But they took till Day Five of harassment and solitary to let him go.

No apology.

This happened in God Blessed America. It happened to him.

And for the five days and nights he sat alone in a cell in Sacramento, no one asked where Dr. Karanbir Singh was. Adela is illegal — she wasn't going to call anyone, even if she had known whom to call. Nadir thought he'd forgotten their squash game — in his experience, “interviews” only happened to Muslims. His students waited ten minutes and left. Bradnock said later he thought Karan was sick. Karan didn't believe him.

The dean, a supposedly well-educated man, seemed to believe that the constitution was suspended and would be for the foreseeable future. He didn't think it could protect foreign-born people or non-citizens in a time of war. National origin, he said, that was the key.

What if they'd kept Karan longer? Who would have called an attorney, organized protests or demanded his rights? It was the only time he'd wished Rita was there. Or any wife. Or a single relative living in the USA. He has called civil rights attorneys since his release, but they're swamped with Guantánamo cases or simply unwilling to take his.

So what should he answer? Was the marriage worth it? Is it worth it now that fear has replaced love?

“It was worth it in the beginning,” he says. A fluted space
appears between him and Uma, magnifying each word, his meaning. She regards him solemnly.

“Got an ashtray?”

“No,” he says. “Smoking is against my religion.” “Against — no kidding!”

She rises. Goes to the veranda door, steps out, grinds the cigarette beneath her toe on the tiled stair and skips the stub into a flowerbed.

“You're real religious?” she says, returning.

“Not very. My sisters say I'm a Sikh out of habit. Habits from the seventies. They tease me, say I'm more observant than many Sikhs in Delhi.”

“Delhi. In India, right?” She takes the chair beside him. “So, do I got relatives there?”

He restrains himself from correcting her English.

“Oh yes,” he says. “You have aunts, cousins.”

“Grandparents?”

He places a black and white photo before her. “First of all, here's my grandfather. My father's father, Dadaji — he's ninety years old.” The photo is circa 1943, before he was jailed by the British, and Dadaji is wearing a plumed turban and kurta salwar. Karan tells Uma how Dadaji fled Pakistan in 1947, taking the last train from Gurdaspur to Delhi before the British-decreed borderline between India and Pakistan came down. How he found out a few months later that Gurdaspur ended up in India after all. But Dadaji couldn't go back there after what he'd seen.

The patriarch's birthday, he tells Uma, brings Karan and his cousins back to Delhi every year. He does not mention his memories — the petulant roar of the aged tiger demanding love as his due, the tribute to be paid for the treasure each of them hosts in blood and bone: his hardy seed, his memories in their genes. If she ever meets him, let her make up her own mind about him.

Uma has what he came to America for. Economic freedom,
intellectual freedom. She can be anything, do everything he once wanted to do, more than can be accomplished in one lifetime.
You are born here,
he wants to tell her.
You cannot be deported. You have light skin; you will never understand.

“And what,” he asks, changing the subject, “do you do?” and nearly adds, with your freedom?

She works at a bar near an auto plant. The customers are mostly auto workers. Good people, she says. All just trying to get by. She makes good tips. Flexible hours, so she could care for Rita. She still lives in Rita's apartment — in Indian Village, by the way — “not your kind of Indian, ha ha.” She works out with weights, has good friends from school — Ashley, for instance.

“Do you have a boyfriend?”

She hesitates, seems to weigh her answer. “Not right now.”

“Pretty girl like you?” A clumsy attempt to tease.

She looks away. Picks something off the coffee table. “What're these?”

“Gandhi slippers.” Minni sent them last year, courtesy of some Indian traveller.

“They look like real silver.”

“They are silver.”

“Wow. What are they for?”

“For? Nothing. Just beautiful,” he says. And his reminder of one man's ability to bring about change in a whole economy, one man's struggle against colonialism in every soul-diminishing form.

Uma puts the slippers down.

“Ma loved the movie. I liked Ben Kingsley better in
House of Sand and Fog.”

Karan is unwilling to reduce Mahatma Gandhi to the film version, though he'll admit that harnessing religion in the cause of independence was an act of cruelty against a newborn country.

He moves the slippers to the lower level of the coffee table.

Another picture. “My mother. A widow. But she managed to raise three of us. Me, my two sisters.”

It's safe to say his mother would have loved to meet Uma, since it's an untestable hypothesis, so he does. Uma glows at this comment; his breath catches in surprise.

“In fact, I'm sure they'd all like to meet you, get to know you. Here —”

Wedding pictures of Gagan, then Minni. His princesses in their flame-red lehngas, festooned with gold hand ornaments, hair ornaments, necklaces, bangles and nose rings. Henna curlicued all over their hands, kajal ringing their large black eyes.

“How come they aren't wearing turbans?”

“Only Sikh men wear turbans.”

“Yeah?”

“A few Sikh women in North America wear them, but I've never seen a Sikh woman wearing one in India.”

“Doesn't seem fair.”

“To the women, you mean?” Protest poises on the tip of his tongue — the only religion in which women and men are equal, etcetera etcetera —

“To the men,” says Uma, turning the page. She sighs and exclaims over more wedding pictures. “Bet you miss India.”

“Sometimes.”

“But you love it, right? Then why didn't you go back?”

“Wasn't much to go back for.” Karan had escaped it all once the Emergency was lifted. Escaped two thousand rupees per annum with scooter allowance, dearness allowance and government housing in seven-storey tenements, escaped the years necessary between application and receipt of a telephone, escaped the corruption, the pidgining of English as it mixed with Hindi, replaced them all with different cares. But … “You have to leave to learn how much you love people. I missed my mother, and I do miss my sisters.”

He tells her about his cousins, aunts and uncles all over the world. “We're a globalized family,” he says and laughs.

She laughs, a little uncertainly.

“Where's your pa?”

He shows her a picture. “My father — your grandfather — died when I was seventeen.” He doesn't add that he was seventeen when Prime Minister Indira Gandhi's thugs dropped off his father's blood-spattered, turbanless body. Seventeen when he lit his father's funeral pyre, travelled to Hardwar by train with his father's ashes resting on his knees. Someone said his father had written articles critical of Mrs. Gandhi's sterilization programs. In later years he had studied the correlation between WHO's population targets and the PM's quotas, but that data was no comfort. Oh, the slow torment of learning to live without Papa, the need to invent a gilded version with wings. Even with loving uncles who had pooled their resources to send him to school in the US.

“Speaking of fathers, what did Rita say about me?”

Uma rises, moves to the screen wall, and looks into the foliage. She turns back to him after a moment.

“Ma said you were smart, tall, thin — she wanted me to be thin.” Palms on hips, Uma rolls her eyes. “Never showed me a single picture, hated cameras. Any time I got bad grades in school it was your fault. When I was real small, I used to ask if we could go live with you, but she said she didn't want a husband, just me.”

“Yes, Rita was like that only.”

“Always thought she was joking around about that — but now I think maybe she did mean it and I just didn't want to believe her. Said you had moved back to India when I was a few years old and she didn't know where. I used to bring it up every once in a while but never heard any different till last year.”

Rita! A sardonic laugh escapes him. “Moved back to India. Either Rita didn't know me very well or she didn't want you to try to find me.”

Even now, when he goes back, more than twenty years fall away on landing, as if the North American continent hid itself in a pre-Columbus fog, as if five thousand years of touching the feet of elders suddenly evaporated his years of cultivating a firm European handshake. Even his American accent melts in Delhi, replaced by the silent head-wobble yes, and the Arey-yar! Rushdiestyle speech rhythm of the Delhi University lad he once was. But live there again?

Maybe he no longer knows how.

“Or she didn't understand the news from India in the eighties.”

Since 1984, when politicians gave tacit permission for riots and thousands of Sikhs were killed in Delhi, he can't imagine living in India. After the riots Karan turned into one of those swaggering Non-Resident Indians, an ugly NRI, making every member of his family aware of the favour he bestowed by his presence each year in a country he now abhorred. Oye! Such a bastard he was then!

Then came Montreal. He actually felt safer wearing his turban in Montreal than in India. It calmed him down. Allowed him to explore the economic rationale underlying the pogroms.

He can't describe these things. Context, nuances, qualifications, time frames. He has one weekend. One weekend in which to counter all that Rita must have filled Uma's mind with in twenty-three years. Or one weekend in which to fill in a whole lot of blanks.

“So what happened last year to make Rita break her silence?”

“We were watching TV,” says Uma. “May or June? The news came on after
Cheers!
and Ma saw this skinny old guy and she sat up in bed. That's a Sikh, she said. And I'm like, What is? He is! she says. See his turban? Like your pa, she says. First time I ever heard you wore a turban. See his beard? That's like your pa. So we kept watching as this guy was getting sworn in as Prime Minister of India.”